A new Cold War
I’ve been feeling a little under the weather today, but I’ve been watching the developments in Ukraine closely. The big news was made by Ukrainian President Zelensky, who announced on Facebook that he had “been told” that Wednesday would be the day Russia attacks Ukraine, only to have his statement “walked back” by his spokesman as being “ironic.” Richard Engel, of NBC, was nonplussed when asked about the apparent imminent attack, indicating that Ukrainians are used to off-the-cuff remarks of this kind from their president, who after all had a successful career as a comedian before entering politics.
I’ll have more to say on Ukraine and Russia tomorrow, but for the time being, it’s looking more and more like Vladimir Putin wants a new Cold War with Europe. He is surrounded by old cold warriors, many of whom come from the KGB as he did, and they think just like him. What they would like this new Cold War to look like is also becoming clearer every day. Putin wants to go back to the post World War II Russian posture of being the bully on the block who can push smaller neighbors around and tell them what to do whether they like it or not.
Ukraine has the misfortune of being Neighbor Number One.
Stay tuned.
Pax Americana. The USA projected an aura of the world's security force, kind of like the cop on the global beat. It always depended more on projection than reality, but it was enough.
Until Trump, when the world saw the USA emperor no longer has any clothes. Our dissolution emboldened Putin. China too has become aggressive toward Taiwan and possibly beyond. My friends in Scandinavia are worried. Our Trumpian pratfall cum farce cum racist putsch creates an enormous power vacuum and upsets the world order in ways we cannot predict.
Like old warriors, they're always fighting the last war. Here's a thought, we're done with rushing to the rescue of every point of crisis on the globe. It wouldn't have been so bad had we done it well, but we didn't do all that well. We acted like a bunch of Northern European Crusaders marching of to the Holy Land to rescue Jerusalem from the Muslim Arabs. Those of us who study history know that on the whole, the Crusades failed. They spilled a lot of blood, and cost European nobility a whole lot of their treasure; but there were compensations. Those of us who were smart enough to handle it learned astronomy, philosophy, geometry and algebra, all of which the early Church Fathers had a great deal of trouble with.
More recently, first, we rearmed the French and facilitated France to reenter their colony in Vietnam. We got suckered into a military assistance program post-WW II, because we couldn't say no to an anti-communist charade. Nevermind the fact that between 1940 and 1944, French Communists the principal source of internal opposition to the German occupation. The French Resistance was like the late arriving guest at a party who, once he had arrived, acted as if he was the host. Someone in the State Department wet his pants thinking about how France could 'go Communist' in the 1946 elections, and all else followed. No one cared to remember that this was after we had to rescue the French from their own Fascist government, and they repaid us by giving us the finger on NATO. We have this habit of sending people overseas to do a job that requires finesse and discretion, and we end up with blowhards like William C. Westmoreland. Our version of Colonel Blimp.
We supported the Chinese Nationalists led by Chiang Kai-shek during the Chinese civil war, arming them with billions of dollars worth of arms, only to see them kicked off mainland China in 1949. Once the Nationalists were ensconced on Taiwan, we kept our Seventh Fleet on station to deter the new Communist regime from invading. I clearly recall the brouhaha over the shelling of two off-shore islands held by the Nationalists, Quemoy and Matsu. That was in 1958, about the same time we ramped up our Military Assistance Program in Vietnam. Dwight Eisenhower refused to rescue the French from their defeat at Diene Bien Phou, but the Republicans were apoplectic over Red China, and our politics were tainted accordingly.
Vietnam we've talked about. No further discussion is required.
Middle East. We became Israel's BFF, supported by a wide swath of the American electorate, BUT the difference here was that they were better at defending themselves than than any of our other MAP clients. We're still there because the Israelis are in some ways a better version of us. And, our own natural anti-Semites, the Evangelicals, are in thrall with the notion that somehow Israel will be a celestial wormhole through which they will be transported to some sort of heavenly paradise. The irony is that in this new era of cyber warfare, the Israelis are coming up with stuff that is equal to or better than anything American high tech can produce, so it's nice to have them on our side.
The Middle East is a scorpions nest, and it's a battle over countering Russian imperial ambitions and access to cheap oil. Keeping the Russian bear at bay put us right in the middle of their ancient rivalries, and as usual, the Republican hotheads fucked it up the moment they got the chance. Iran and Iraq together. I'm looking at you, George W. Bush and Dick Cheney. Right now, Israel is cutting all the deals, and we're standing guard like Roman centurions. The usual suspects bitched and moaned about Biden's decision to leave Afghanistan; but we were faced with the choice. We could leave, however ungracefully it turned out to be, or we could send more troops in to fight the Taliban, all the while knowing that the trillions of dollars that we spent trying to get the Afghanis to stand up and fight for their own future turned out to be wishful thinking on a grand scale. Two or three days ago, a story in the New York Times has us leaving Iraq under similar circumstances. If that is what is likely to happen, we need to start passing the word to our interpreters, houseboys, and anyone who allied themselves with us, to get their papers in order, and book passage on the next plane out of there. Once they get here, they will find lots of company down the local gas stations working side-by-side with people who came here under similar circumstances. That's about as humanitarian as we're prepared to be at the moment.
The one relatively successful operation was in the Balkans when NATO thwarted Serbia's power play. We're not in a position now to do that with Putin, but we can buy some time and make Putin pay a steep price for crossing a line. Unlike last time, the crisis over Sudetenland in 1938, we're gearing up for a fight with a clearer eye about what's at stake. Putin has a limited amount of time to accomplish his objectives, and we've upset his timetable. I'm hoping the Israelis can give us some help, as they appear to be natural survivors who have figured out how to prosper anywhere. They owe us big time.